I have tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama’s response to the sermons and writings of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But the unanswered questions remain.

(…)

My concerns were retriggered when I read for the first time three excerpts from Rev. Wright’s sermons published several weeks ago in a national news magazine:

– “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
— Sept. 16, 2001 (the first Sunday after 9/11)

As I read and reread these words, I keep thinking: If my rabbi ever uttered such hateful words from the pulpit about America and declared all Palestinians to be terrorists, I have no doubt I would have withdrawn immediately from his congregation.

There are a few things about this opening part of Davis’s article that quite simply strain credulity.

Mr. Obama made a choice to join the church and to ask Rev. Wright to marry him and his bride. He said for the first time a few weeks ago that had Rev. Wright not recently resigned as pastor of the church, he would have withdrawn. But that only reraised the same questions: Why didn’t he act before the resignation?

If he did not want to withdraw from the church – and I truly try to understand his personal difficulty doing so – then why not at least speak out publicly and say, in the famous phrase of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “No – this is unacceptable.”

Furthermore, after knowing about some of these sermons and having serious problems with some of their messages, why did Mr. Obama still decide to appoint Rev. Wright to his official presidential campaign religious advisory committee?

Some have suggested that any Clinton supporters who continue to raise this issue are “playing the race card” or taking the “low” road.

When I said on CNN recently that concerns about the Wright-Obama issue were “appropriate” to continue to be discussed, my friend Joe Klein of Time Magazine said, “Lanny, Lanny, you’re spreading the poison right now” and that an “honorable person” would “stay away from this stuff.”

Attacking the motives of those who feel this discomfort about Senator Obama’s response or nonresponse to Reverend Wright’s comments is not just unfair and wrong. It also misses the important electoral point about winning the general election in November: This issue is not going away. If many loyal, progressive Democrats remain troubled by this issue, then there must be even more unease among key swing voters – soft “Reagan Democrats,” independents and moderate Republicans – who will decide the 2008 election.

In other words, Davis is making the argument that Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright is really an issue of electability, which is really the only argument that Hillary has left at this point, especially when it comes to the superdelegates.

Davis admits that he is “a strong supporter of and a substantial fundraiser for Hillary Clinton for president,” and says that he “still believe[s] she should and will be the Democratic nominee.” But, he claims to be acting entirely on his own.

The real question, I think, is what we’ll be talking about during the last two weeks leading up to the primary. Since TexOhio, we’ve gone through two separate cycles. First, it was all about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Obama gave his Philadelphia speech and that seemed to be the end of it. Outside of the right-wing talk show realm, there hasn’t been much talk about Wright for weeks now and it’s hard to believe that it will have any more of an impact than it has already had; which, according to the polls, has been relatively minimal.

Then, it was all about Hillary and her three instances of lying.

When Rev. Wright was the story, the Clinton campaign benefited, both nationally and in Pennsylvania specifically. If the Wright issue were to come up again and help Clinton get the big win in the Keystone State that she needs to maintain a credible case to stay in the race, don’t you think they’d be helping it along if they could ?